Majority Blues

This is just a short little word balloon that I've occasionally found dangling over my head. I hate being the majority. I am as hopelessly majority as you can possibly imagine. I am a white, middle-aged male. I am a Christian AND a Republican. I live in America. I have no disability. I was born of relatively successful parents and I am, curently, relatively successful. My vision is slightly better than 20/20. I am a little over six feet tall. I'm not overweight. I don't smoke, I'm not an alcoholic, I don't have any native American, African, or latino in my bloodline. I can't even claim to have dyslexia or ADD.

OK, so maybe being me ain't all that bad. But still.

You wanna know what being the majority means? It means being the only ethnic, racial or religious group that anyone, anywhere can mock and ridicule and give hate speeches about without any fear of lawsuits or even contradiction. In fact, most of us in the majority are so filled with inane, pointless guilt about being the majority that we'll agree whole heartedly with the worst things said about us on the off-chance that all those in the minority might like us a little better. We're like the pathetically mis-guided geek in my junior highschool who thought he could cut out the middleman and curry favor with the rest of us by walking up to classmates, grinning and saying "I'm stupid." The worst crime anyone in the majority can do is to have the temerity to defend one's self.

For instance, to the argument in favor of reparations for African Americans because of slavery, I wish to say I agree whole-heartedly. In fact, I am in favor of even more than the traditional two-hundred acres and a mule. Any ex-slaves should be paid in full, in today's dollars, for every hour they worked and be given control of a proper percentage of their former slaveholder's estate, with interest. They should then sue the slaveholder for wrongful imprisonment, and the slaveholder should be jailed and/or given the death penalty, depending on the severity of said imprisonment, as well as the number and treatment of those slaves. I've read Frederick Douglass's biography, and I have, if anything, an overdeveloped sense of vengeance. The problem is finding any living ex-slaves. Right? I mean, it would make as much sense for anyone living today to collect or pay reparations for crimes last committed in the 1860s as it would for the great-grandson of a dead murderer to go to the electric chair, with the grandchildren of the victim cheering on.

But imagine anyone in the majority making that argument. Sure, they might do it, but they'd be resigning themselves to being purely and seamlessly hated, reviled and possibly audited by the pooled resources of the IRS and the Rainbow Push Coalition. Even more than they already are.

Being in the majority means not being allowed to have a meaningful opinion on much of anything. I am not allowed to have an opinion about abortion (how dare a MAN have an opinion about something as feminine as pregnancy!?), or gay rights (easy for YOU to say that marriage is between a man and a woman, having been BORN STRAIGHT!), or Affirmative Action (what's a WHITE GUY know about the oppression of other races, apart from being the oppressor!?), or a multitude of other topics. The logic of this seems to me (in my majority arrogance, no doubt) to be somewhat like a jury being told they have no basis to judge a serial killer because, not being either serial killers themselves or a serial killer's victims, they can have no experiential perspective to judge from. (serial killer's bumper sticker: Keep Your Laws Off My Victim's Body!)

I suspect that the jealousy of the majority to be in the minority, with all the protections and benefits thereof, is the explanation for so many new diseases and genetic ailments. One isn't an alcoholic anymore, one is born with the "alcohol gene". Fat people aren't gluttons, they are the victims of "Big Fast Food". Smokers are beleagured dupes of the tobacco industry. From Repetitive Stress to Restless Leg, there's a Syndrome for everybody. Why? So we can claim our own little minority and feel a little better. I may be a white anglo-saxon censervative male, but I've got Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, dammit. I go to support group. I feel the pain of the people. Peace, brother. Stick it to the Man.

(Sigh) Ohh, to be in the minority. To have a pack of lawyer sharks ready to nastily devour anyone who dared make a joke about my beliefs or the shape of my nose or my tendency to forget where I put my car keys. To be given special business opportunities and loans and college admittance just because of my genetics or my gender. To be revered for my perseverence and grit, called a hero, even if all I did was slink illegally across the border to get a job laying bricks. To finally, finally, have a socio-political-racial group I can blame all my problems on! With the full support and slavering indignance of at least one major political party, of course.

It could happen, you know. Us white Christian middle-aged Republican males could be overtaken by another group, probably liberal-leaning Mexican former-illegal-aliens. Contrary to popular belief, I'd be all for it. They may want to be the majority now, but they'll live to regret it, methinks. Just wait until they are sitting in their golf carts with their poverty-stricken white teenage caddy listening to some talk show host denouncing the "brown Democrat Catholic old-boys network". Then it'll be cool to be a complaining white Christian Republican, because we won't be the majority anymore.

Mixed blessings are the best we in the majority can hope for.